According to ad tech metrics firm Moat, “for the first six months of 2014, publishers ran 4,971 high-impact ads, putting them on track to be 11 percent ahead of 2013.” Moat Pro, the company’s ad search product, divides high-impact ads into 11 types, including skins, overlays, interstitials and pushdowns. We introduced many of these formats years ago, and they’ve caught on for a reason. They’re viewable, almost by anyone’s definition.

You’ve seen these ads — they are the home page takeovers that prevent you from reading what you’d like to read until they’ve finished running or you have clicked on something. They are the videos that auto play. In general, they are interruptive, if not slways actually intrusive. However, for the publisher they generate the highest CPMs.

So big high impact ads are here to stay. They’re now among the mainstays of even premium publishers like the Wall Street Journal, especially those who want to run fewer ads on a page and preserve a more pristine editorial experience for their visitors. Publishers are caught in a bind, because they have to support the creation of content on their sites with dollars. They’re by and large profit-making ventures, and if they don’t make a profit, they go right out of business. We’ve seen enough of that. As a publisher partner, we have been dedicated to helping our partners stay in business and make more money.

With the help of high impact formats, publishers can run so-called intrusive ads and make more money on fewer, higher priced placements, rather than add to the clutter on their sites with more smaller, potentially less viewable ads.

The revelation that half of online ads are going unseen has raised the stakes for advertisers, who are now demanding that publishers prove that their ads are being seen for a minimum amount of time. At the same time, big, high-impact units are a panacea for publishers desperate to prop up falling online ad rates.

We think high impact formats do not need to be intrusive. Our inArticle video format only takes over the page if a user clicks on it. And it recedes quickly when finished playing. It is polite in its approach. Our Inview Slider ad does not appear unless a reader scrolls down to it, and also recedes quickly, politely.These formats take standard creative, so they scale without greater expense for the advertiser.

The bottom line for all of this, however, is that things we like and WANT to see are not intrusive. In fact, they are engaging. Viewers may want to see a 10-second video of a car they’d like to buy, an investment that may help them retire, or an anti-aging serum. Better targeting renders an ad less intrusive, because it is shown to someone in the market for what it’s selling.

What else can make a high impact format more engaging? Stellar creative.